In this three-hour durational performance, I staged a ritualistic collision between private family memory and transgressive discourse. Dressed in a clean-cut suit with white paint on my face, I walked perpetually in a circle while reading aloud de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. Behind me, a muted projection of my own family’s wedding archive played on the wall.
With my ghostly appearance—white face, ritual pacing, the silent wedding footage— I embodied a spectral temporality. The wedding was, per chance, my own lost future (the impossible promise of normative happiness). De Sade’s voice, read in a monotone manner for three hours without a break, was a revenant of an Enlightenment-era rationality of cruelty that haunts modern domesticity. The circular walk is a hauntological gesture: a non-progressive loop where past archives refuse to stay dead, and I become a walking ghost caught in-between.
3 hours
part of Life Moves Pretty Fast (Something’s Passed...), BLOCK C, Groningen, NL
curated: Klaudija Ylaite and Michiel Teeuw
stills taken from a live stream
(made possible with the help of
Big BSTRD, INTO NATURE, and Klaas Koetje)
curated: Klaudija Ylaite and Michiel Teeuw
stills taken from a live stream
(made possible with the help of
Big BSTRD, INTO NATURE, and Klaas Koetje)